The ultimate purpose of releasing any content is to rank on SERPs. SEO plays a significant part in assisting us to rank in SERPs. This is why it is critical that we create every piece of content with SEO in mind.
But it is reasonable to have conflicts over whether the topic or the keyword is more significant. Topics and Keywords: What’s more important in SEO? What’s the easy answer?
In your digital marketing career, if you are working in the SEO field it’s important to understand the significance of these two. So, before we get into what’s the right answer, let’s first understand what keywords and topics are.
What are Keywords
In simple words, Keywords are the words and phrases that consumers use to search for what they are looking for. Keyword research includes discovering terms and phrases related to your content that consumers are searching for and then incorporating those keywords into website content for optimization.
What are Topics
Apart from keywords topics also plays an important role in SEO. Search engines evaluate the topic of a piece of content to assess relevancy to search requests. You should constantly strive to provide material that is useful to your audience as well as develop content that is connected to one another and interrelated to provide better subjects or coverage for both users and search engines.
Topics and Keywords Belong to Each Other
Topics are made up of relevant keywords. Working on both can help improve your SEO strategy.
Many keywords are expressions of a particular topic. Ideas are defined by the relevant subject but are represented by the various expressions, words, and phrases used to discuss them.
As a simpler example, coffee could be the topic of finding keywords such as coffee, dark roast, latte, beans, coffee beans, arabica, lobster, and arabica.
Words can be both keywords and topic names, and there are hundreds or thousands of potential keywords associated with a topic. Also, keywords can refer to multiple topics (the keyword “coffee beans” refer to these topics coffee, coffee beans, and beans).
Google is constantly updating its algorithms to make sure that the search is consumer-related. The key here is to find what the searcher is looking for when using a search engine.
Choosing the correct topic and keywords to go with it will almost certainly help carry you to the top of the search engine results page.
So, Topics and Keywords: What’s More Important in SEO?
Keywords and Topics both hold their separate values in terms of SEO.
In the initial stages of the SEO strategy, it was largely keyword-based. As a result, it was easy for marketers to simply communicate to Google what their content is about by inserting keywords in prominent places in the article, which often resulted in keyword stuffing.
But search engines have now found new ways to analyze your content. At present time search engines primarily prioritize topic accuracy to determine which web pages are going to rank. Once it has been determined how much expertise and significance your site has regarding the topic identified in a search query, your site will be ranked based on keywords.
Therefore, only keyword research does not help create better content, and enlarging the list does not solve the problem. Topics help focus on the key issues being discussed in conversations.
This is why it has become increasingly necessary to conduct topic research while coming up with blog post ideas. However, this does not imply that keyword targeting has lost its significance. When the keywords in your blog are highly relevant to high-volume search queries it will help Google find your content faster.
As a result, it is critical to establish an SEO strategy based on topics and keywords. There are a few factors that can help in creating optimized content.
Understanding your audience: These are the individuals for whom you are creating content. It is critical to comprehend the answers they are seeking. You may accomplish this by becoming acquainted with your target audience. You may also learn about their search behaviors, interests, and so on in this manner.
Find out trending topics: If you’re creating content for your website, it’s always a good idea to write about topics that are trending right now. Find out what difficulties individuals in your niche are having, what questions they have, and what worries they have. By observing how much people are struggling with the same problems, you can construct your content around that.
Keyword research: With a variety of keyword research tools at your disposal, it’s always a good idea to look for the most relevant and high-traffic keywords. You should always include a few long-tail keywords in your list of targeted keywords.
Monitor and modify: After your content is live, it is a good idea to track its performance on a regular basis and make improvements as needed.
Analyze your competitors: Always keep an eye out for your rivals. Look at the keywords they’re utilizing and their SEO approach to figure out how to rank effectively. You can additionally target keywords that they are not utilizing in order to reach a new set of audience.
Conclusion
It’s a really complicated subject, so it’s difficult to draw concise and satisfying conclusions on this issue. Still, we can look at the evidence and summarise it into some important discoveries:
It’s a very bad idea to focus only on keywords. The user experience will be degraded and the ranking will not be as good as it was before Hummingbird.
So, while I think keywords are still important, they should only serve as a guide to finding good topics and as an anchor point to orient the search engine in the right direction. In short, do a keyword search before selecting a topic, but don’t sacrifice direction or content for a small number of keyword phrases.